Canadianizing" an American Communication Textbook
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"CANADIANIZING" AN AMERICAN COMMUNICATION TEXTBOOK JENNIFER M. MAClENNAN University of Saskatchewan ABSTRACT. Ail discourse, says Edwin Black (1972), exerts "the pull of an ideology" even when not explicitly designed to display such a pattern of beliefs. Much of the discourse that helps shape our identity and understanding does so through a network of interconnected beliefs and implicit assumptions that are rarely explicidy recog nized. Textbooks perform exactly such a function, since, as many people wou Id acknowledge, to do so is precisely their purpose: to help "enculturate" newcomers to the expectations and assumptions of a discipline. This paper offers a study of the process involved in what has become almost a minor industry in Canada: the "Canadianization" ofAmerican texts for the domestic market. The paper's focus is my experience in producing the Canadian edition of David Zarefsky's Public Speaking: Strategies for Success. My goal is to reveal something of the extent to which the study of communication not only "naturalizes" a disciplinary model but also implicitly encodes a set of identifiable cultural values and assumptions. RÉS U M É. Selon Edwin Black ( 1972), tout discours permet à "la force d'attraction d'une idéologie» de s'exercer, même si le discours ne vise à affirmer aucun modèle de croyances. La plupart des discours qui contribuent à façonner notre identité et notre compréhension font intervenir un réseau de croyances et d'hypothèses implicites qui sont reliées entre elles et dont l'existence est rarement reconnue explicitement. Les manuels jouent précisément ce rôle, car, comme beaucoup le reconnaissent volontiers, leur raison d'être est précisément de faciliter «l'acculturation» des novices qui assimilent les attentes et les hypothèses propres à une discipline. Cet article porte sur un processus qui constitue pratiquement un secteur d'activité mineur au Canada: la «canadianisation» de manuels américains pour le marché canadien. Il traite surtout de l'expérience personnelle de l'auteur qui a participé à l'adaptation canadienne de Public Speaking: Strategies for Success de David Zarefsky. Il vise à montrer dans quelle mesure l'étude de la communication a pour effet non seulement de «naturaliser» un modèle de discipline, mais aussi de coder implicitement un ensemble de valeurs et d'hypothèses culturelles reconnaissables. MCGILLJOURNAL OF EDUCATION· VOL 3S NO 1 WINTER2000 31 Jennifer M. MacLennan Canadians who teach subjects such as public speaking, interpersonal com munication, argumentation, and communication education are aware, at least superficially, of the extent to which the field in which they are working is a fundamentally American phenomenon: its roots are American, and so are most of its theoretical developments, its professional organizations, and its textbooks (Smith, 1954). These books, for the most part produced for American students studying in departments of speech communication in American colleges and universities, form a primary resource for all who teach courses in the discipline, including those who do so in Canada. Although the discipline traditionally known as speech, or more recently speech communication, is a familiar one in American universities, it is an but unknown in Canada. With its roots in the ancient discipline of rhetoric, the modern department of speech communication offers courses in a variety of areas of communication study, including rhetoric, instructional commu nication, communication theory, philosophy of communication, organiza tional communication, and so on. Public speaking is offered as a "basic course" by most such departments. (For a more detailed discussion of the discipline's nature, see MacLennan [1999 & 1998], National Communica tion Association [1996], and Smith [1954]. Brief overviews are also avail able on-line at the Department of Speech Communication at the Univer sity of Washington and at the National Communication Association). Speech communication teachers in Canada, then, face an interesting prob lem: although the authors of textbooks in communication conscientiously strive - perhaps even more so than scholars in other disciplines - to make them inclusive by freeing them as far as possible from culturally bound assumptions, speech communication as a discipline does in fact exhibit a distinctively American cultural ideology. 1 hope to show in the pages that follow, that it does so fundamentally, not just incidentally. The central question that this paper poses is this: T 0 what extent, and in what ways, have the disciplinary values in the field of communication been shaped by the American experience? To what extent do the cultural atti tudes and values assumed by a course text affect the audience's understand ing of speech communication as a discipline? As a way of "getting at" this question, this paper will focus on my experience in creating the Canadian edition of David Zarefsky's Public Speaking: Strategies far Success (Zarefsky & MacLennan, 1997). My goal is to reveal the extent to which the discipline of speech communication not only "naturalizes" a disciplinary model but also implicitly encodes a set of identifiable cultural values and assumptions that are rooted - not surprisingly - in the American experience. The "Canadianization" of American texts for the Canadian college market involves translating American references and contexts into terms more immediate to, and comfortable for, a Canadian audience. At first glance, this task might appear to be a straightforward one of replacing recognizably 32 REVUE DES SCIENCES DE L·tDUCATION DE MCGILL • VOL 35 N° 1 HIVER 2000 Canadianizing an American Textbook American names and diction with Canadian equivalents. It is true that some direct substitution is possible; for instance, a list of well-known speak ers such as "Jack Kemp, Ann Richards, Mario Cuomo, Jesse Jackson, and Barbara Bush" can readily be replaced by a Canadian list that includes "Joe Ghiz, Pierre Trudeau, Margaret Atwood, Bob White, Gwynne Dwyer, and Mary Walsh"; "dormitories" easily become "residences"; and "affirmative action" can he replaced by "employment equity." However, the process of textbook transformation is at once more subtle and more complex than such instances of simple substitution would suggest. Making a truly Canadian edition of an imported text involves much more than cosmetic adjustments, because an American text - particularly one in communication - is culturally different not only in diction and example, but also in assumption, value, and orientation. That speech communication textbooks display American cultural values should surprise no one; after all, just as communication practices have a cultural dimension not always visible to participants in a given communication exchange, so too is the study of communication given colour by the values of the culture in which it takes shape. As a product of its American context, speech communication cannot help but display the "dominant opinions and unquestioned beliefs which form an integral part of [that] culture" (Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca, 1971, p. 20). What is interesting about culturally naturalized assumptions is that, as pervasive as they are, they are not normally visible to those within the culture; instead, these cultural attitudes are embedded heneath the surface of cultural participation, taken for granted in social exchanges "typically without either [participant] being aware of [them]" (Fairclough 1989: 83). They are simply part of the "common sense" of the cultural ethos, and are assumed by the memhers of the culture "to be shared by every reasonable being" (Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca, p. 99). For anyone who teaches and practices speech communication in Canada, the problem of cross-cultural adaptation is compounded by the subtlety of cultural distinctions. This professional community operates within a "North American" context that may appear, especially from south of the 49th parallel, as synonymous with "American." Given the surface similarities between the two cultures, an American might he tempted to assume that no special accommodation is required in adapting an American text for a Canadian audience. After aH, how different can the cultures be when the bulk of Canadian television programming, nearly all feature films shown in Canadian cinemas, and the majority of available print materials in Canada are American in origin? Besides, even where differences exist, clearly Cana dians are used to reading American materials and making the mental adjustments necessary to translate to their own experience. MCCiILLJOURNAL OF EDUCATION· VOL 3S NO 1 WINTER 2000 33 Jennifer M. MacLennan However, as 1 hope to illustrate in this paper, there are important and systematic differences in values, culture, politics, and public life between the Canadian and the American experiences that have been traced, docu mented, and revealed by numerous scholars in the humanities and social sciences (Gwyn, 1995; Adams, 1995; Lipset, 1990; Malcolm, 1985; Gwyn, 1985; Frye, 1982; Berton, 1975).1 Among the differences that these scholars have documented are historical (Canadian history is counter-revolutionary, in contrast to the revolutionary spirit of the US); political (Canada's par liamentary democracy contrasts with the American constitutional repub lic); and sociological factors (collectivist, even socialist, in contrast to the culture of individualism that distinguishes the US). As weIl, our central philosophies also differ significantly; Canada's original constitution,